By Jill Slater

WSA awash in opinions about Sask. drainage

Nov 13, 2014 | 3:37 PM

Hundreds of farmers, rural politicians, and conservationists have weighed in, and now it’s up to the government to direct the tides of opposing views to create a drainage plan for Saskatchewan.

“It’s worse now that it was five years ago. The more rain we get, the more snow we have, the more water we get and it has got no place to go,” said Stan Ganczar, councilor with the RM of Griffin, near Weyburn.
 
The RM has experienced significant flooding in recent years, and people are hoping to build a drainage ditch to redirect water into the Alameda Dam.
 
“We’ve been underwater and we didn’t see crops for three years because we were too wet. And we’re wet now. I still didn’t get my winter wheat combined, the combine is getting stuck. Everybody is behind,” said Ganczar at the annual Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) convention.
 
The bulk of people who took part in a consultation process set up by the Water Security Agency (WSA) were farmers. Nearly 80 per cent of them say they are impacted by drainage, but less than half admit to draining land.

Drainage on the prairies has been a decades-old battle, with farmers trying to gain more farmland and conservationists trying to save wetlands.

In the midst of this, politicians in the countryside bear the brunt of the squabbles between neighbours when land is adversely impacted by drainage activity.

“If it damages somebody else’s property, they could be eligible for compensation. That’s certainly something that SARM does not want to see. We want to see stiffer penalties. We want to see more enforcement,” said Ray Orb, acting president of SARM. “Part of it is a learning process and part of it is I guess our job will be to educate our rural ratepayers a little bit better.”

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And the other part, according to the WSA, is creating updated regulations. That’s the one aspect people surveyed overwhelmingly agreed on.

“Developing new drainage regulations is a priority for our government,” said Scott Moe, minister responsible for the WSA.  “We look forward to ongoing dialogue with our stakeholders as we move to update and improve drainage regulations that have been in place in Saskatchewan since the 1980s.”

There were several areas concerning drainage that people agreed on to various degrees. They agreed that “drainage is not a right,” high-risk projects should be scrutinized more rigorously, wetlands should be taken into account in the regulations, forced compliance in areas with complex drainage issues, and the WSA should have powers to enforce the rules.

However, people disagreed on how to define high-risk projects, how wetlands should be addressed, and whether the policing of the regulations should be complaint-based or proactive.

The survey is all part of a 25-year plan to address water security in Saskatchewan.

“Obviously there are things that are happening with our weather systems that no one can predict. So long term, we’re hoping that that strategy does help take care of some of those problems,” said Orb.

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